Citizen Plogging! Where sport and ecocitizenship meet

For those who like to combine sport and environmental protection, there is a new discipline that has already won over millions of people: plogging! This new green trend consists of picking up litter you find on your path while jogging or doing other outdoor sports activities. 

The idea behind it is to optimize the time you normally use for training, to also do something positive for the space you live in, be it a metropolis or a village in the countryside or mountains. Participants take to the streets equipped with gloves and rubbish bags to pick up the rubbish they encounter during their fitness session.

The term Plogging is the perfect combination of the Swedish word plocka upp (to collect) and the English word jogging, and it was Erik Ahlström - PLOGGA who invented it and gave birth to the trend in 2016. Since then, Plogging has spread to various European and non-European countries thanks also to initiatives linked to the SDGs and SmarCities initiatives and today it is a global phenomenon involving over 20,000 people a day in more than 100 countries. In several countries, groups and associations have sprung up in various cities to play sports and clean up streets, parks and riverbanks. 

In Italy, the World Plogging Championships were born in 2021, organised by AICA (International Association for Environmental Communication), open to amateur and professional runners. In the first edition, almost 800 kg of waste were collected, scattered along more than 1780 km of trails in the Western Alps. The next edition will be held in Genoa from 29 September to 1 October.

Alba was the first city in the world to institutionalize plogging every year on World Environment Day, with the event "Plogging with the right bag" and APRO organizes several plogging events in the city to raise awareness among the younger generation and participated in events organized for all citizens. 

Try plogging, it's good for your health and for the community!